Grillo Kidnap Case: No Victim, No Tape, One Informant

The federal government says Leo Grillo tried to have a woman kidnapped and flown to Mexico.

No one was kidnapped. No one was flown anywhere. The woman, Adriana Duarte Valentines, was at home in Lancaster, California, the whole time. The only time she appeared bound and gagged was in a photograph the FBI made.

The rest of the government’s case comes from one man: James D. Clark of Phoenix. Clark is a gold dealer. He took $6,333,973.74 from 118 retirees and never delivered their gold. When the FBI was investigating him for fraud, he came to the FBI with Leo Grillo.

Grillo, 77, founded DELTA Rescue, the world’s largest no-kill, care-for-life animal sanctuary. He has been held without bail at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Los Angeles since March 3. He has no criminal record.

Over seven months of calls from jail, Grillo has told Frank Report what happened between him and Clark. Put his account next to the FBI’s own affidavit and the government’s case shows its weak points.

The FBI lists four meetings between Grillo and Clark at the Los Angeles Equestrian Center in Burbank.

The first was in December 2025. It was not recorded.

The second was on January 7, 2026. Clark told the FBI that at this meeting Grillo asked him to kidnap Duarte “along with her young child,” fly them to Mexico, and hold them there, and that Grillo offered $100,000. This is the heart of the government’s case, and it was also not recorded. No audio, no video, no witness. It rests on Clark’s word alone.

Three facts from the government’s own papers raise questions about that account.

First, Clark did not go to the FBI right away. The affidavit says he reported the “plot” on January 31, more than three weeks after he says Grillo proposed it.

Second, the child is gone. The indictment names two alleged victims: Duarte and her husband. The young child, who was central to the plot Clark described, does not appear in it.

Third, the $100,000 never appears again. No recording ever shows or mentions such a payment.

Clark’s affidavit leaves out one payment.

As Frank Report first reported, Clark had already shorted Grillo $35,000 on a peso exchange. To work off the debt, Grillo hired him to help with a documentary called My Dog Is Not Candy, about Mars buying up veterinary clinics and raising animal care prices. Grillo gave him a deal memo and a $50,000 check, made out to Clark’s company, One Dog Ranch.

“I gave him that check with the deal memo for My Dog Is Not Candy,” Grillo said. “I gave him a fifty thousand dollar check to proceed with investigating and interviewing the investors in private equity who are sucking up all the vets in the country.”

Clark cashed the check. He never signed the deal memo.

“Every time I asked him, ‘Oh yeah, I am going to send it to you,'” Grillo said.

The affidavit says nothing about the $50,000. That matters for a simple reason. Clark told the FBI that Grillo was “willing to make a down payment of $30,000 or $50,000” toward a kidnapping. If Clark had been paid a kidnapping down payment, that check would be his best evidence, and he would have handed it over. He did not mention it. Either he hid $50,000 from his own handlers, or the FBI knew about it and left it out of a sworn affidavit.

“He did not tell them about the deal memo or the fifty thousand dollars,” Grillo said. “He only told them about the twenty, which was a follow-up.”

Grillo says Mexico was Clark’s idea, and so was the lawyer.

Clark told Grillo he had business in Mexico: a money exchange, a limousine company, a house. He said he knew a powerful lawyer there. In Clark’s telling, the lawyer would invite Duarte to Mexico on a paid trip to a resort. There, the lawyer would tell her that her American attorney had kept a $1 million settlement offer from her, and that she could take the money now instead of waiting years on an appeal.

“I thought I had an attorney that he had,” Grillo said. “It was all about legal. Everything was legal.”

“They invented this lawyer,” he said. “I don’t know anybody in Mexico like that. I don’t know any lawyers.”

Grillo says that when Clark proposed having men take Duarte by force, he refused.

“At one point, he said, we can have guys come and get her,” Grillo said. “I said, look, that’s not, no. I said it’s got to be done correctly, because we need her on our side. We have to show her that we’re the good guys and she was taken advantage of.”

His point was practical. A woman held against her will cannot sign a settlement. She cannot sue her own lawyer.

“We needed her friendly,” he said. “That’s the whole point.”

He also says the government’s motive makes no sense: “If she fell off a bridge, they’d come looking for me, because we had a case. Why would I do something so stupid?”

The third meeting, on February 13, is the one where the government says Grillo agreed to the plan in detail. It lasted about 2.5 hours. According to the affidavit, the recording equipment “failed” after about 30 minutes.

FBI agents were sitting nearby, listening live. None of them recorded the remaining two hours on a backup device or a phone. What the government says happened in those two hours comes from the agents’ memory and notes.

The affidavit says that during this meeting Grillo agreed to send Clark $20,000 “to arrange for a pilot and a plane,” and that Grillo “understood” some of it would pay for “holding the woman in Mexico.” It does not say whether those words are in the 30 recorded minutes or in the two hours nobody recorded.

Grillo’s account of that meeting is different.

“He kept throwing stuff at me,” Grillo said. “He kept outlining what the lawyer’s ideas were. He kept running different ones by me. Some of them I didn’t like. But he pitched them with variations, and then I shot all but one down.”

“That’s the one where they invite them down,” Grillo said. “He had estimated that it would cost, between flying them down, putting them up in the resort, and hiring the production crew to do the B-roll, twenty grand. That was where we ended it. We didn’t make any definite plans. He was going to go back and talk to the lawyer, the so-called lawyer.”

Six days later, Grillo mailed Clark a $20,000 check. The memo line said “Production.”

“Eighty percent is missing,” Grillo said of the recording, “and that’s exculpatory in itself.”

The government’s best recording is a phone call on February 24. Clark made it from the FBI’s Phoenix field office, with agents in the room, on a burner phone the FBI provided. He used Telegram.

Clark did the talking. He said Duarte and her husband would go to the airport “willingly and at that point they are going whether they want to or not.”

Those words describe a kidnapping. Clark said them, not Grillo.

Grillo answered, “Alrighty, we are good.” Then he called back right away and asked, “Why did we need that call?” He told Clark, “The problem with that is that if anyone picked that up it puts me right in the middle of it.”

By then, Grillo also knew Clark was in trouble with the law. Earlier, he had asked Clark about his gold business.

“I said, ‘Are you in trouble?'” Grillo said. “He says, ‘Well, they’re following me around building a case.'”

The government asks a jury to believe that Grillo chose, as his partner in a kidnapping, a man who had just told him the federal government was following him.

On March 3, Clark woke Grillo with a call at 7:30 a.m. He said it was urgent. At the equestrian center, he got into Grillo’s camper van and showed him a photo on his phone of a man and a woman tied with zip ties, the woman with duct tape over her mouth. He said they were being held in Lancaster because the flight could not land where it was supposed to.

The FBI made the photograph. The video camera Clark wore that day failed too. Only audio survives.

Grillo did not know what he was looking at. For more than ten years DELTA had shipped dog and cat food every month to shelters in Baja, and it once ran a 400-dog shelter in San Felipe.

Grillo says the governor of Baja sent a delegation to thank him. When Clark said the plane had to change course, Grillo thought of the drug wars and of Mexican police.

“I’m figuring the police,” he said. “Police and the cartels are having drug wars. They’re shooting each other. So when he said they couldn’t land, they had to change the destinations, I said oh, the drug wars. He says yes. Now I know it’s the police.”

That is why, on the government’s own recording, he said: “They’re holding them in Lancaster? Oh my God. Their sons are in their twenties, they can call Sheriff.”

He also suspected the photo was fake. As a photographer, Grillo had used Photoshop for years. The man in the picture was large, and Duarte’s husband is small.

“To me, it looks fake,” he said. “He’s trying to bilk me out of money. But what if it’s real? What if the cops are stuck and the cops need me?”

Then, he said, “Nothing’s making sense. Then I figured, wait a minute, it’s a holdup. This guy is trying to rob me.”

Clark asked for $10,000. Grillo wrote the check on a local U.S. Bank account, not the Nevada account he had used for the documentary payments. The branch was less than a mile away.

“I took a check that I could cancel because it’s local,” Grillo said. “I could go down to the bank 20 minutes later and cancel this check.”

He carried two small .38 pistols that day, one in each pocket, because he feared Clark, who is about six-foot-three and ex-military. “I put two little pistols in my pocket,” Grillo said, “as he’s dangerous.” The guns never left his pockets.

Clark took the check and got out of the van. FBI agents came in and arrested Grillo.

Strip the case down, and this is what the government has:

Two meetings with no recording, where Clark says the kidnapping was proposed.

A third meeting where the FBI lost two of two and a half hours.

A phone call where the kidnapping words came out of Clark’s mouth, inside an FBI office.

A staged photo shown to a 77-year-old man, on a day the video camera failed.

A $10,000 check written on a local account that he says he planned to stop.

And a cooperating witness the FBI itself describes in footnote 1 of its affidavit as “the target of a separate FBI investigation into alleged fraud,” who is “working with law enforcement in hopes of receiving favorable consideration.”

“There was no person involved who was the victim,” Grillo said. “There was a photograph and a story.”

Clark is free. The 118 retirees who sent him their savings are still waiting for their gold. Nobody has explained the metals plant in Jalisco that he left out of his bankruptcy filings.

Grillo is in a cell, denied bail because he might use a telephone.

I have listened to Leo Grillo tell this story from jail for seven months. He is not a careful talker. He says too much. He talks in movie terms. He trusts the wrong people. That is how he ended up in a van with James Clark.

But the government has to prove that he intended to seize a woman and hold her against her will.

The conversations where Clark says Grillo planned that were never recorded.

The FBI lost the two hours that might have settled it. The words “whether they want to or not” were spoken by the informant, inside an FBI office.

The FBI had a man who took six million dollars from retirees. It traded his case for a headline about an old man and a kidnapping that never happened.

If this goes to a jury, the jury will have to decide whether to believe James D. Clark. I don’t.

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